Drawing cyclohexane is an important skill:  it helps teach you to present a two-dimensional image that can correctly and concisely convey 3-dimensional information. First the ring.  The major conformer for most cyclohexanes is the chair: To draw this, keep in mind one important rule: Bonds that are parallel in the real molecule should be drawn parallel in the picture. Our general goal is to provide an accurate side-on perspective of the ring, so it's useful to make a model and draw bonds in pairs as you see them: You will need to practice this. Once you have mastered this, the placement of substituents follws relatively easily. There are two kinds of substituents:  equatorial, in the general plane of the carbons, and axial, oriented perpendicular to this plane. Axial bonds are easiest to draw:  they are all vertical, and drawn away from the vertex at each carbon position.  There are three "up" and three "down." Equatorial bonds need to be drawn parallel to the C-C bonds to which they are parallel in real life: The chair is the most important form of cyclohexane, but not the only one.  Others are the boat (a high-energy form; rarely seen), a half chair (very high energy) and a twist-boat (an intermediate in the ring-flip isomerism between two chair forms). Make models of these and compare their appearance and behavior to Figure 4-9 in the textbook. The boat is pretty easy to draw, but I do not expect you to master drawing the twist-boati or half-chair.  None of these three is a significant component at room temperature. Conformer (and energy relative to the chair) See Figure 4.9 (p. 142) in your book to see the reaction energy diagram connecting these in a ring flip. Jmol structure Black background White background Spacefilling model Wireframe Ball & Stick Half-chair (+45.2 kJ/mol, +10.8 kcal/mol) CH_HalfChair.pdb Twist-boat (+23 kJ/mol, +5.5 kcal/mol) cyclohexane_TwBoat.pdb Boat (+29 kJ/mol, +6.9 kcal/mol) cyclohexane_boat.pdb